1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains to the assembly of a plurality of base metal multilayer ceramic chip capacitors ganged to provide a single large capacitance or high value capacitor for high frequency applications. The capacitor is constructed with ceramic chip capacitors to perform with high reliability, and to provide high yield, low cost production. The impedance and ESR characteristics of such a capacitor should be superior to aluminum electrolytic capacitors of the same value at frequencies over 50 kilohertz.
2. Description of the Prior Art
For a variety of reasons it has become desirable to replace aluminum electrolytic capacitors with capacitors which have a higher reliability, a longer life and a lower cost. With the rapid progress of the electronics industry, electronic equipment has been making various demands of passive components for miniaturization, high performance, high reliability and long life. Multilayer ceramic capacitors have matured with the development of contemporary electronics and can meet all of these demands. The one drawback to multilayer ceramic capacitors has been the limited capacitance which can be achieved within a given size device. It is very difficult to produce a large capacitance capacitor with a single large chip component due to the higher probability of physical defects causing poor electrical performance. Significant increases in the physical size of multilayer ceramic chip capacitors are almost impossible to achieve because of very low production yield and very expensive costs.
Consequently, high capacitance in multilayer ceramic capacitors is achieved by constructing a single capacitor from a plurality of ganged chip capacitors. This technique provides high reliability, high production yield and low production costs. It further permits the manufacturer to utilize the fully automated production processes which have been built for conventional multilayer ceramic capacitors. Such large capacitance multilayer ceramic capacitors are constructed with ganged chip capacitors with a common terminal, leads and resin encapsulation. The dimensions of the constituent chip components are frequently standardized into a single size and capacitance value is also standardized into a single value at each working voltage. Various sizes of capacitor cases may be provided. The maximum capacitance value and the number of chip components may be varied. Copper terminations are frequently used for the various case sizes. Such large capacitance multilayer ceramic capacitors are commercially available from Murata Manufacturing Company and NEC Inc.